Education: Report Card

¶ Colorado State College of Education awarded I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson a D.Sc., then decided to doctor his wife as well (with an L.H.D.). Said President William R. Ross: “Whenever I have heard Watson speak, he has always said he owes his success to his wife.”

¶ Purdue University offered to buy Omaha’s Mid-West Airlines and its six planes for $69,000, said it wanted to give its School of Aeronautics a “live laboratory.”

#&182; Kansas City schools took a big step in “eliminating the competitive spirit among school children.” Instead of listing grades, report cards will now read like this: “Work Habits—finishes work on time . . . Social Attitudes—is sometimes inconsiderate . . . Arithmetic—has difficulty with thought problems . . .”

#&182; After years of work on a “pronunciation map” of the U.S., Professor C. K. Thomas of Cornell University announced that he had found at least one continental divide—a line running from Vermont down the Alleghenies, along the Ohio River, then cutting across Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. If a man comes from east of the line, he will say “fahrest”; from the west, “fawrest.” The same goes for “ahrange” and “awrange,” “Flahrida” and “Flawrida,” “hahrrible” and “hawrrible.”

#&182; After testing 220 white and Negro babies on such items as crawling, babbling, standing and grabbing, Psychologist A. R. Gilliland of Northwestern University poked another hole into an old superstition. Mean I.Q. of the white babies: 103; of the Negroes: 105.6.